Referencing

When writing a scientific document, you will be expected to reference every fact you’ve learned in order to write the document. My general rule of thumb is if you didn’t get it out of your course textbook, you should reference it!

Luckily you won’t be expected to write a lot of scientific documents until you get to university, however the earlier you learn, the better. In general, at this stage, the minimum requirement is that you give the date of publication, the name of the author, and the title of the work.

However, there is a more universally accepted way of referencing which is used at the highest level, and it’s called the Harvard Referencing System. This website gives you a comprehensive guide to referencing every type of document you could ever want:

EXPLORE - Harvard Referencing (CTFM) Links to an external site.

We’ve outlined the most common things you’ll have to reference, which are scientific journals and websites. A lot of people will read scientific journals online, but you can still reference them in the same way, you don’t have to reference them as a website. Think of them as the equivalent of a book read on an e-reader – it’s still a book.

The general format for referencing a journal article is:

Last name, First initial. (Year published). Article title. Journal title, Volume (Issue), Page(s).

Examples: Look at these screen grabs of various articles and see the references beneath.

Zhang, W et al (2004) Phospholipase Da1-derived phosphatidic acid interacts with ABI1 phosphatase 2C and regulates abscisic acid signalling. PNAS 101 (25) 9508-9513

Notice that when there are more than two authors you just list the first author’s name followed by ‘et al’, which is Latin for ‘and others’.

Valentine, J. et al (1994) Morphological complexity increase in metazoans. Paleobiology 20 (2) 131-142.

You might find the numbers, frustratingly, listed in different places depending on the paper you’re reading. The issue will usually be in brackets, and the page numbers are usually obvious by the fact that they’re separated by a dash.

Rost, B. and Sander, C. (1993) Prediction of Protein Secondary Structure at Better than 70% Accuracy. J. Mol. Biol. 232, 584-599

Note here that there is no issue number. That’s fine, just leave it out. There are also only two authors so they’ve both been listed. We’ve also used the abbreviated journal title, as that’s what they’ve used in their own journal. However, if you prefer to use full names you can google the abbreviation and you’ll find the full name.

King, L. et al (2011) Beehive fences as effective deterrents for crop-raiding elephants: field trials in northern Kenya. African Journal of Ecology 49, 431-439

Notice that the information is not always found in the same place. Some data was found at the top of the page, some at the bottom, so you just have to look around for it. Also notice, outlined in the green box, an example of how a scientific paper will list references in the body of the text. You state the fact, and then immediately write the name of the author and the date of the reference. This way a person looking to check their information can simply go to the bibliography at the end of the paper, which will often be arranged in alphabetical order of author and look up Newmark et al (1994). They will then find exactly which article is being referenced, and where to find it, and in the meantime the text of the paper itself isn’t too heavily interrupted.

Websites, on the other hand, are much easier to reference, so we haven’t screenshotted any of them. All you have to do is write the name of the website followed by the URL and (importantly) the date that you accessed the website. So, for example if we went to look for a piece of information on the impact of family history on cardiovascular disease, we might reference the British Heart Foundation website as follows:

British Heart Foundation, Family History. Available at https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/risk-factors/family-history Links to an external site. [accessed 05/04/19]

And remember, as always, to ask your tutor for help if you need anything at all!